Q&A: David Bossie Defends Citizens United, Because, Well, David Bossie Has Already Won the Big Game

TAMPA, Fla. — The most important man at this convention was doing some serious basking here on the convention floor. Dressed like a casino floorwalker, a dead ringer for Bob Hoskins, he bathed himself in the adoring attention of the conservative media, which considers him something of a cross between John Peter Zenger and Vito Corleone. There is no more important person at this convention — nay, in this entire election — than David Bossie, the chairman of Citizens United media, the winner in one of the most transformative Supreme Court cases since Dred Scott v. Sandford, and a career practitioner of the fine art of political ratfking, in its fullest Segrettian definition, who has had his life's work blessed through the incredible naivete of Justice Anthony Kennedy by the highest court in this land. He is sanctified by it. His entire career has been made pure. And that was some pretty heavy lifting by the Court, let me tell you.

"I think your career has different chapters," Bossie told The Politics Blog. "Before the Supreme Court was a chapter. Just leading Citizens United. Post-the Supreme Court decision is a different chapter. My time on Capitol Hill as an investigator was a chapter. My time as a fireman living in a firehouse was a chapter. So, you know, everybody has a chapters in their lives.

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"Like the Heritage Foundation inside the conservative movement is known for and became the policy arm. They each do their things and they have niches that they have figured out over time. Not... They didn't start that way necessarily. And so today, you know, Citizens United — in 2004 figured out that the making of documentary films can be powerful and the advertisements can be powerful."

In 2010, the Supreme Court decided Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, in which the Court essentially blew up almost a century's worth of campaign finance-reform legislation, opening the floodgates to what we have experienced this year. The decision legitimized corporations as having individual rights, and it legitimized the concept of money as speech, and it was written tightly enough to make any remedy short of a constitutional amendment almost impossible. Central to it was Justice Kennedy's remarkable assertion that the distorting effect of a flood of corporate money on political speech would be obviated by disclosure requirements that were made easier "in the age of the Internet." Instead, of course, the money went flooding into various phony charitable entities that don't have to report their donors, and we were off to the races.

"Oh, of course," Bossie said. "Look, for a year and a half or two years, Barack Obama ridiculed super-PACs and said they were a threat to democracy, if I'm not mistaken. He said they're the worst thing for our country and for democracy and it was the skyyyy is falling."

(He sang this part.)

"But please. One day he just stands up and says, 'Well, great, but give money to my super-PAC.' It's similar to Bill Maher, basically a left-wing guy who has a TV show — he ridicules Citizens United on every show. I don't think he misses an opportunity, which is kind of fun. Look, he's a funny guy, but, you know, The Daily Show's funny, those guys are very funny. Unfortunately, they don't know what they're talking about most of the time.

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"So Bill Maher ridicules, attacks, you know, lies about Citizens United and the ruling and then takes full advantage of it by giving one million dollars to Barack Obama's super-PAC. So it's all good and fine. But have the intellectual honesty to tell everybody, 'Hey, I really don't know what the hell I'm talking about.' But they can't do that, because they love to be know-it-alls. That's their job, really, is to be a know-it-all."

And it all came about because Bossie made a film about Hillary Clinton that was pretty much as spurious as most of the work he'd done in his entire career, and a court ruled that the advertising for the film violated existing campaign laws about "electioneering" within 30 days of a primary. In 2004, Bossie and Citizens United had sued on precisely those grounds, arguing that ads for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 violated the same laws. He had lost that case. In the interim, he recast his organization as a legitimate filmmaking operation and so, when a lower court ruled against him, he was ready with the argument that convinced Kennedy and four of his brethren.

All the work he did in the past was merely prologue. Citizens United was launched by a guy named Floyd Brown in 1988 to race-bait Michael Dukakis with the face of Willie Horton. Bossie signed on in 1992, just in time for the rise of Bill Clinton He prospered — and truly made his bones — in the fragrant anti-Clinton underworld of the 1990's. It was Bossie who pursued the mother of one alleged Clinton paramour into a hospital where the woman was visiting her sick husband. He got fat on the corpse of Vince Foster, hiring on as an investigator to crackpot conspirator Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana, the guy who shot a melon in his backyard in an attempt to prove that Foster could not have committed suicide. (Bossie lost that gig for peddling doctored audiotapes of jailed Clinton lawyer Webster Hubble in an attempt to frame Hillary Clinton.) However, when his organization put together a documentary about Hillary Clinton that seemed to be such an obvious dirty trick that television stations refused to air it, Bossie saw his main chance.

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Bossie, of course, sees the new political order brought into being by the decision in his case to be only a matter of "leveling the playing field" against the forces arrayed against him, which include, by his lights, George Soros, Moveon.org, and "the unions."

"First, they're very angry," he told me. "Then, they're dishonest. They're angry because for years — decades — they've had a monopoly over the unions and then the creation of MoveOn.org and that whole 527 group that came on the scene. So you had George Soros spending tens of millions of dollars on these groups doing the ground game and all of that. Well, guess what? They're angry because this Supreme Court case leveled the playing field. It created opportunities that didn't previously exist for conservatives to do the same thing. It's not that only conservatives can do it. Clearly, the Romney people have super-PACs, and lots of Democrats have super-PACs across the country. They're angry because that's something they didn't want us to be able to have."

This, of course, elides the fact that those groups rose in response to the superstructure of corporate-funded institutions that were the birthplace of the conservative movement that has made Bossie rich, to which liberal politics spent almost 20 years catching up, and never really quite got there. (Move On, for example, was a response to the Clinton impeachment kabuki, and it originally got its name from the notion of "Censure and move on.") Asked about the collateral damage his ratfking did to any number of people in Arkansas who got in the way of his pursuit of the Clintons, Bossie is utterly unapologetic.

"I think the people of Arkansas benefitted from our work."

Perpetual victimhood has been the engine of David Bossie's entire career. Big clanging brass ones have been his stock in trade, and the Supreme Court shined them up for him, and now he's the star of the show here because of what he won. We may never know how much the rest of us lost. And, somewhere in the great beyond, Donald Segretti and Howard Hunt curse themselves for their lack of ambition.

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